Moreover, can we rest the absolutism and finality of Jesus upon anything less than the last complete outpouring of His soul unto voluntary death for men’s salvation?  I do not think we can, and it is a requisite that we place larger emphasis upon this holy mystery of our life through Christ’s death, the substantial soul and secret of all missionary progress in all ages of the Church.

Before we can see the miracle of nations entering the kingdom of God, before we can dismiss the black death of apathy which rests on so many professedly Christian communities, before we can dominate the social structure in righteousness and justice, the Church must be raised nearer to the standards of New Testament efficiency.  And New Testament efficiency rested upon the perfect divinity and all-persuasive mediatorship of “Christ and him crucified.”  The personality of Christ involves for many of us the entire relation of God to His universe; He is “the central figure in all history,” and Pie is “the central figure of our personal experience,” creative in us, by His inaugural experience, of all we are in Him and for our fellows.  Thus we make great claims for the Lord of the harvest, and we make them soberly, and we know them true for our spiritual consciousness, and we are prepared to defend them.

Yet I, for one, do not hesitate to admit that the theological necessities of missionary work are many, and that they must be recognized and met before it can fully accomplish its infinite design.  Indeed, the rule of Jesus in all these aspects of His mission clarifies and simplifies the gospel.  It is plain that such a gospel, wherein the living personality of the Christ deals with the living man to whom we minister, is not to be beset by complications and abstractions.  Its spiritual topography embraces the height of good, the depth of love, the breadth of sympathy, and the width of catholicity.  It was meant for the race and for the far-reaching reciprocities and inexpressible necessities of the race.  It is attuned to the cry of the common heart.  Its interpretations have the sanctions of an authoritative human experience which has never failed in its witness.  Sometimes I have challenged these honored servants of the evangel who have come back to us from quarters where they were busy on the errands of the cross.  Almost pathetically, with the painful interest of one inquiring for a long absent friend of whom no news has been received, I have solicited the missionaries.  They came from the south of our own dear land, where they administered to the negro; from the arctic zone, from the farther East.  Their wider vision, their more imperial instinct, were plain to me, and my usual question was, “What do you teach the impulsive colored man and the stolid Eskimo and the pensive Hindu and the inscrutable Asiatic?” And they replied, “We teach them, that God is a personal spirit and Father, whose character is holiness and whose heart is love; that Jesus Christ is the designed and supreme Son of God, who lived in sinlessness and died in perfect willing sacrifice for the eternal life of all men, that by the will of God and in the power of His spirit men may have everlasting life and, better still, everlasting goodness, if they will accept and trust in Jesus Christ for all.”